Why the "Bidenomics" Pitch Isn't Working
People want bread *and* roses—and rightly so.
In recent months, the Biden administration has welcomed a string of economic data that has allowed them to argue—credibly—that their policies are working. Unemployment is at historic lows. Inflation has cooled. Corporate earnings for the last quarter came in largely ahead of expectations. The economy grew faster than economists had predicted. The oft-foreseen recession still appears safely in the distance, despite high interest rates. Stock prices rallied from their 2022 lows. And Biden’s signature green energy infrastructure legislation is set to create plenty of jobs—disproportionately in parts of the country that voted against him in the last election.
You might think that people would be pleased. Understandably, the Biden team has trusted to this presumption and is making this solid economic performance the cornerstone of their appeal to win the next election. For most of the summer, after all, Biden and his surrogates have touted the manifest success of “Bidenomics” as the main reason to support him in November 2024. It all makes sense, right?
The only problem is: this appeal is not working. Biden’s average disapproval rating crept up during the start of the summer and has held steady at around 54% ever since—this during the same period that the economy appeared to recover. More than half the country seems consistently displeased with Biden’s performance—and unwaveringly so—even as hard evidence has accumulated that the economy is improving under his watch. What gives?
I submit the problem lies not in any mistake as to the true health of the economy—but to the fact that, as much as people care about jobs and purchasing power, these do not really determine their voting behavior. When people cast a ballot, they really do it for one key reason: morality. And Democrats need to speak directly to this moral dimension of life, or else they will cede the terrain effectively to Republicans.
Unfortunately, the contrary belief—namely, that voters respond primarily to messaging about jobs and the economy—remains entrenched among political strategists, and no doubt accounts in part for all this messaging we see about “Bidenomics.” Dubbed variously “populism,” “Shor-ism” (after the name of one of its prominent exponents on the center-left, David Shor), strategies grounded in this worldview tell Democratic candidates that they should ignore hot-button culture war topics, and shift the focus of the election at every opportunity to non-controversial kitchen-table topics from which nearly everyone can see a direct benefit: jobs, health care, etc.
The strategy makes intuitive sense: appeal to the strong force of personal self-interest on the part of the voter; focus on the things that unite us (everyone needs to put food on the table; everyone needs to be able to afford a trip to the hospital), rather than what divides us.
But, as logical as the case for such a strategy may be, its track record of success is lacking. Democratic candidates who use “populist” messaging have not outperformed their peers. Advocates of alternative messaging strategies point, for instance, to the Tim Ryan senate candidacy in Ohio. Ryan ran a highly bread-and-butter-oriented campaign for Ohio’s Senate seat—and then lost it to newly MAGA-ified Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, who ran a blisteringly culture-war-oriented and identity-focused campaign.
We can start to see the reasons for this failure of the “populist” strategy as soon as we try to apply it to ourselves, and our own actions, rather than what we imagine to be true of other people. After all, if we ask ourselves: what makes you vote the way you do?, very few of us would reply: because it’s in my self-interest. I expect a job or a paycheck increase at the end of this. Most of us are not so crass—plus, we recognize that the forces that actually shape our financial lives are highly contingent and specific. Few of us would stake them on one throw of the dice in a presidential election. Therefore, we would be more likely to respond to this question by saying: “because it’s the right thing to do.” We support one candidate or party over another because they speak to our moral selves.
The next step is simply to recognize that this centrality of the moral life is true not only of ourselves, but of everyone else too. People vote a certain way because they think it is the right one, on objective and universalistic grounds—not because they believe it is in their personal self-interest.
If self-interest really governed elections, after all, very little of what has happened in American politics in recent years would make much sense. Take my home state of Florida, for instance, from which I recently returned on a summer visit. Florida politicians informed by rational self-interest would probably not spend all their time harassing and antagonizing theme park/resort operators, health care professionals, and big agricultural producers who employ a largely-undocumented workforce (seeing as these are the state’s largest industries). Yet, they are doing just that. Far-right Florida voters have devoted the post-pandemic years to putting one of these groups after another in their crosshairs. They do this not because it will benefit them economically or financially—it will not; and they probably know this—but because they believe, however mistakenly, that they are right to do so.
We on the left have a hard time accepting this. It’s difficult to believe people could be acting out of a sense of morality when the moral concepts in question seem so patently wrong and misguided. We are loath to attribute a moral sense to people who are acting so immorally, by the standards of our own value system. But the truth is that people live their political lives in the moral realm—they vote based on what they think is right and proper—and if Democrats don’t make their pitch to voters on this level, then the deeply-flawed right-wing moral framework will be the only one on the table. Republicans will therefore be able to position their policy agenda as the embodiment of morality as such.
Of course, the belief that morality is a mere superstructure, and that appeals to it will go unheeded so long as people’s “real” economic lives are not first attended to, has a long pedigree on the left—far predating David Shor. It’s one implication of the doctrine of historical materialism, after all—i.e., the belief that economic forces are the ones that truly shape human destiny, and that moral and spiritual values are a mere ideological emanation that mystifies these forces—as was made explicit in Engels’s graveside speech upon the death of Karl Marx. Here, Engels referred to what he called “the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.”
The idea would thenceforth recur in writers of various stripes who had been shaped by the socialist tradition. George Bernard Shaw made it the theme of his play parodying the Salvation Army, Major Barbara, in which he criticizes the notion that people can save their souls without first filling their bellies. Bertolt Brecht put the same idea more succinctly in the Threepenny Opera, when one of his characters says: “first grub, then morals.”
First grub, then morals: this, briefly, is the essence of Shorism, and is the principle underlying political strategies like the “Bidenomics” pitch. And, as I implied above, it is easiest to apply this view of human nature to people whose moral codes we hold in contempt.
Few of us would say of ourselves that we place food before morals, or that we are incapable of making a moral sacrifice before we have first put bread on the table. But we can easily believe this of other people, particularly when they seem to adhere to a radically alien moral system. Confronted with a value system so different from our own, we conclude that its adherents must simply not be moral beings at all. They must be creatures of base appetites, amenable only to what the poet Heinrich Heine once called “soup-logic and dumpling-reason,” whose morality is a superficial papering over of their true self-interested motives.
This is certainly how the right tends to see us liberals; and to the extent that we embrace Shorism and populism, it is all too often how we are inclined to see them as well.
But the truth is that right-wing policy proposals are all rooted in moral values of some kind: they are just very different values from the ones Democrats are inclined to emphasize.
Take, by way of illustration, such a quintessentially “bread-and-butter” issue as that of student loan forgiveness. Here, one might think, is a simple matter of economic policy that should be fought over on the basis of the various interests at play. Yet, the debate that unfolded in public was entirely concerned with morality.
Many liberals and progressives will accede readily, of course, to the notion that their side of the debate is rooted in morality. After all, it’s plainly the just and compassionate thing to relieve people’s debts wherever possible, right? Are not generosity and forgiveness cardinal human virtues?
Where liberals will struggle is in recognizing that conservatives too cite specifically moral reasons for their loathing of the policy. But they do. Conservatives detest loan forgiveness for primarily the same reasons they oppose a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants or robust spending on public benefits and social programs: they believe, however misguidedly, that such policies are unfair and therefore unjust. It is a different version—or at least a different emphasis—than the version of fairness and justice that liberals invoke. But it is sincerely-held for all that.
The conservative model of fairness might be described as “fairness-as-deservingness,” in which rewards should be proportioned according to whether or not people followed “the rules” (often taken to be fixed and handed down for all time by divine authority). To allow people to escape negative consequences for what conservatives see as a violation of these “rules,” therefore, is not only not particularly moral—it is, in their eyes, the height of immorality. This is the true heart of their objection to debt forgiveness, or to what they term “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants, or to relief for the poor and jobless, etc.
This, stripped of the pseudo-legal rationales, was all the Supreme Court’s decision on Biden’s student loan forgiveness program earlier this summer was really about. The conservative justices, during oral argument, would even imply as much. Time and again, they seemed to forget during this argument that they were supposed to be considering whether the administration’s program exceeded their legislative authority, or whether the states challenging the policy had standing to do so, and instead simply attacked the policy on moral grounds. “How is it fair,” the conservative justices would ask, “for someone to be relieved of their debts, when other people did the responsible thing and never took on debt, or planned their lives around not wanting to have debt, and might have made different decisions if they knew these debts could one day be forgiven?”
By arguing along these lines, the judges were appealing to an intuitive sense of fairness-as-deservingness. They are like the laborers in a parable in the Bible, found in Matthew 20, who complain when they receive the same wages as other workers who arrived only at the last hour of the day: isn’t that unfair? they ask. Why should they receive the same reward as us? Didn’t we work harder than they did? Didn’t we pay our dues? Didn’t we wait our turn in line? And now they come along at the last minute and get a bunch of stuff for free?
This is the essence of how conservatives see the moral universe and the American economy; they see liberals as the unjust landlord who dispenses equal rewards to all, regardless of their input and sacrifice, and themselves as the hard workers who deserve to be compensated more richly in proportion to their allegedly greater effort and contribution.
But the point of the Gospel parable, of course, is that the disgruntled laborers are wrong. While they may have a point about fairness, there is a higher moral value that trumps it: call it the value of generosity. In words that leant the title to John Ruskin’s proto-socialist nineteenth century essay collection, Unto This Last, the parable concludes as follows:
So when evening had come, the owner of the vineyard said to his steward, ‘Call the laborers and give them their wages, beginning with the last to the first.’ And when those came who were hired about the eleventh hour, they each received a denarius. But when the first came, they supposed that they would receive more; and they likewise received each a denarius. And when they had received it, they complained against the landowner, saying, ‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the heat of the day.’ But he answered one of them and said, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go your way. I wish to give unto this last man the same as to you.
This, in contrast to the model of “fairness-as-deservingness,” is the essence of the liberal moral system. It is a moral code that ultimately prizes compassion, mercy, and generosity over the concept of deservingness. It is the one that, upon listening to the complaint of the conservatives who cry out “are you really going to grant debt relief to people when they should have known better?” —or, “are you really going to grant the same path to citizenship to undocumented people as you would to people who came ‘the right way’?”—or, “are you really going to extend social programs to people who didn’t work hard enough to secure a well-paying job or finish college?”—replies: “yes, take what is yours and go your way. We will give unto this last the same as to you.”
Of course, neither moral framework actually corresponds to the reality of the American economy. Obviously, the whole notion of “deservingness” being tied to effort takes no account of the many structural forces that deny people access to rewards in the first place, in our society, regardless of their personal effort.
My point is not that the moral model of the vineyard portrays anything accurately about our true economic situation—it does not. My point is simply to show the values that conservatives appeal to. They talk about the economic situation as if it were like the vineyard, in which some people worked hard and others showed up at the last minute expecting the same reward, and then they point out that this expectation is unfair.
Liberals can respond to this by pointing out that, in reality, there was no fair line to wait in, because many people were denied a place in the line to begin with; they can note that the rewards were never proportioned to effort in the first place in American society, due to racism, systematic exclusion, inherited wealth and privilege, etc.
But I also suspect that, even if liberals were wrong about this as an empirical matter, and the economy really did resemble the “vineyard model” that conservatives invoke, liberals would still take the part ultimately of the munificent landowner. We simply prize the virtue of generosity more than we do that of “fairness-as-deservingness,” and we view it as ultimately the higher standard of morality—just as the Gospel parable implies it to be.
But if liberals never talk about their own value system, then the only model under public discussion will be the conservative one. The disgruntled laborers in the vineyard will cry out “this is unfair—why should these newcomers get as much as we do?”, and so long as Democrats just ignore their arguments, pivoting at every opportunity to repeat “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!”—the disgruntled laborers will forever go unanswered. Voters will rightly wonder why Republicans are the only ones who ever talk about morality, and will ask themselves whether this is perhaps because Democrats have nothing to say on the subject: maybe they are the party of immorality!
Democrats’ only option, therefore, is not to ignore morally-charged issues, but to lean into talking about them in a way that “activates” (and I’m echoing here arguments George Lakoff made decades ago) the values of the liberal moral code: values like compassion, mercy, solidarity—justice too, we might add, but a model of justice very different from the framework of “fairness-as-deservingness”—a model of justice that takes account, by contrast, of redressing prior systemic exclusion from the rules of the game.
And indeed, there are signs that some campaigners and activists are already aware of the need to make this pivot into deploying moral language. A recent piece in Politico described a new effort by a progressive advocacy group to reach out to white working class voters, for instance, not by sidestepping culture war issues of identity and race, but by leaning into them—talking openly about the left’s position on race and identity from the standpoint of our shared value system: justice, equity, solidarity, compassion.
It would be a massive mistake, however, to conclude from all of this that the pathway to Democratic success would be to simply ignore people who hold a different emphasis in their moral value system, and concentrate solely on “mobilizing” people who already share the progressive moral system. Such a “preaching to the choir” approach is only likely to alienate people who are not already sold on the Democratic agenda, and the fact of the matter is that—like it or not—these moderate and unpersuaded voters will determine the outcome of the next election, particularly as they are concentrated in the handful of Midwestern states that could swing either way in 2024.
The approach I am calling for is therefore not simply to double down on progressive messaging, and meet right-wing culture war talking points with a culture war lingo of our own that likewise speaks to our own base but no one else’s.
Rather, I would suggest we recognize that we all have a little of the conservative and a little of the liberal within us. We all have been in the position of the disgruntled laborers, we all can sympathize with their sense of outraged fairness-as-deservingness—and likewise we all can see the moral force of the munificent landowner’s ultimate decision.
And in truth, society probably needs people to hold both sets of values in view, in order to function. Rewards need to be somewhat proportioned to effort in order to satisfy our intuitive sense of fairness-as-deservingness, as well as to provide an incentive for people to make the effort in the first place. Reminding us of this point is the role of conservatives.
At the same time, however, a principle of humanity must intervene whenever we are moved to press the idea of reward-and-punishment too far: generosity, mercy, and compassion must ultimately trump the impulse to squeeze blood from a stone. This is the role of liberals.
Conservatives may recognize both principles, but believe that our current society has strayed too far in the direction of munificence. It seems equally self-evident to me and most other liberals, however, that we are currently way too far over on the side of reward-and-punishment: that a society with one of the largest prison populations on Earth, and where there has been no major immigration reform or expanded path to citizenship for decades, leaving long-term and long-contributing undocumented immigrants stranded with no path to safety or social advancement, and where food insecurity and child mortality rates far outstrip our developed peers—is plainly a society that has erred on the side of “fairness-as-deservingness” to the exclusion of the higher virtues of compassion, generosity, and forgiveness.
And if you believe, as I do, that these shared human values—the values we might call the liberal virtues—are much more in need of emphasis in our current society—given the way it is presently structured—than the opposing values of deservingness and punishment, then the only solution is to talk about these values openly, and to try to activate them within people who don’t already agree with us on every policy issue.
We need to recognize that conservatives have been able to speak to many people because they have done such a good job of activating one set of human values. We must not write off those on whom these appeals worked as immoral or self-interested; they are not—they are, to the contrary, acting in the interests of morality as they understand it. We just need to activate an alternative moral value system, and trust that these values are as universal in human nature as the ones conservatives invoke.
Doing so requires, however, the imaginative leap of recognizing that the people to whom we would appeal are fundamentally moral beings, even if they presently disagree with us. They are not creatures of “soup-logic and dumpling reason.” They won’t be persuaded to change their voting patterns purely by appeals to their self-interest, because they don’t just want jobs and health care and nothing further. They want to do what’s right too, as they see it. They want to live the good and the righteous life too. They want bread and roses. Democrats can give it to them, if they would only try.